Bail Me Out
by VegetaCold
Summary: Danny winds up in jail after he is encouraged to take drugs by Dash. Vlad bails him out-but not without a few terms and conditions. Rated T for mention of drug use and infrequent language.


A/N:

I won't lie. I'm proud of this, because I took my time on this and wrote it over the span of several days. And look at the word count, fools. That is some serious writing compared to my old nine hundred words a chap thing. So take from the improved quality (at least I believe) what you will about this story in the future.

Please review.

~VC

* * *

I wasn't too entirely sure how I got myself into this mess in the first place—to be honest, the last couple of days are a blur, and I can't remember much of their content. But I _can _remember my encounter with Dash and his friends—what would ultimately cause me to wind up here—pretty vividly, as it was one of those times in which you know you are doing something wrong and so, because you are thinking so fast your contemplations come together in a confusing jumble and your heart starts to race, your experience takes on a much more memorable quality—one usually unpleasant. Mostly, I think I remember it so well because I could hear my parents cautioning me with that time old, almost clichéd warning: "Don't do drugs, Danny!"

I remember enough to know that it was a Tuesday that day, and I'd just finished eating lunch with my two best friends, Tucker and Sam. I believe they were both very busy that afternoon—if I remember right, Sam had to report to her art class to finish the sculpture of Medusa she was making out of plaster, and Tucker claimed he needed extra help in the math class he was taking, but seeing as he's one of the smartest kids in school, it was probably safe to assume that he was simply setting out to try and pick up some unlucky girl for the upcoming school dance—and so they finished their lunches in five, maybe ten minutes, and left me alone at the splintering picnic table we usually sat. That area was relatively empty, I remember, and I guess I thought the jocks were giving an even unluckier kid a wedgie on the flagpole—at least it wasn't me, I thought—and had drawn everyone's sick attention. It was pretty quiet, and unlike most days at Casper High, I could actually _hear_ the sound of my chewing, could hear the birds chirping and the wind rustling the trees that cool spring day; in many ways, it was kind of eerie, considering our lunches were usually consumed with the sound of the jocks screaming football lingo we really didn't have the slightest understanding of, but I guess that must be an overstatement, considering I'm _half ghost_. And I guess that, all things considered, I was glad to sit beneath the shade of the tree that encompassed our picnic table that day and allow my otherwise harried mind to dissolve into the much welcomed quiet calm.

There was something else unusual and generally unheard of when it came to the structure of our school—and I truly believe now that this spans to the very edge of our well behaved little town—which was that I could smell what I recognized to be the thick discharge of cigarettes, carried gently on the wind that tousled my messy locks of hair and made the leaves on the tree shuffle and wave simultaneously like fans at a baseball game as incentive for their losing team.

I'm not exactly sure what I thought of the smell, but there was no mistaking it for what it was, as it was one I'd become incredibly familiar with; no one in my family smoked, no, and no one I knew—or so I thought—in this town did, either, but when my family had gone to Wisconsin to take park in my quote, unquote uncle's college reunion, that had been the only smell I'd been able to associate with the man—and how appropriate, huh?—because the morning of the reunion, he smelled so strongly of it you'd think he'd spent the night before at the truck stop at which we'd parked and slept, where we'd been afraid to open the door so as not to let the smell of tobacco in…and maybe he had. It seemed all together pretty plausible that he smoked, seeing as, when I'd toured the castle without his knowing while he caught up with my parents, I made my way into what looked to be a lounge; I guess he must have hid most of the things that revolved around the secrecy that was his ghost half, and all the pictures of my mom (which makes me sick to think about, so I assume that he has enough regard for what is moral that he did not stoop to such degrading measures, at least) but he hadn't bothered to put away the pack of cigarettes he'd left plainly on the small table by an overstuffed leather easy chair, along with a thick glass ashtray which had been first chipped, then cracked but still served its purpose, as it was filled with gray ash and burnt out butts. Yes, there was no doubt about it—he smoked, and whenever I smelled that horrid, suffocating stench, I'd think of him from then on out.

That said, cigarettes did not typically have their chance to evoke his image in my brain, because no one here—again, or so I'd thought—smoked them; in fact, I don't think they even _sell _them in our one and only gas station, and I've heard that if you want to take up the habit, you have to ask the clerk, a kid my age who fails most of his classes—except art, maybe, because Sam's told me that he made a pretty impressive sketch of an entity he told everyone was the abstract representation of Death—and took up the job just for a slight discount on soda, to order them for you. That's just how small our town really is.

So I guess I thought someone must have put in an order, and the source of the smoke hailed from the nearby bar where smoking was illegal but only inside. I don't think I'd been bothered by it—that was, it had never crossed my mind that I could partake in the origin of that very smell and end up in jail for it. Who would? I think if you have any regard for what your parents say—think that you're a pretty good, mellow kid, like they taught you to be—you feel you are to immune to doing such a supposedly hazardous thing, so much so that the thought never makes itself present. But when you're faced with that smell, and the hand which offers the _death stick_, it becomes a whole different matter…and maybe if my thoughts had not drifted back to Vlad Masters, I would have realized it before it was too late.

I guess I'd been thinking of any of our many encounters, or something along those lines; I don't exactly recall what it might be, exactly, but I do remember an image of him surfacing in the lake that was my thoughts, and if my memory is faithful to me, I believe this image derived from one of his many attempts to make me into the perfect half-ghost son he'd always wanted but of course would never have. This picture especially jumped out at me because, if I was being truly honest with myself—and I say this because the idea of such a thing being true is one that spooks me more than half the ghosts I see when I go out patrolling with Tucker and Sam and so I'd rather not recall—his eyes then had shone with something that I can only label as a sick _energy_, a desire stronger than, I think, he has ever had for anything in the entirety of his life—besides my mom, anyway. Those hellish red eyes were bright and I was clearly able to see his thoughts—dreams, really—of our future together as father and son, ruling what he so obviously believed to be a weak population from which he could find nothing remotely positive and which never deserved to be graced with his presence. In fact, I believe that because he was so intent on making this dream a reality, his eyes became clearer still, and I could see my non-existent future as undilutedly as if I were staring at a picture just a foot from my face.

I don't know if I'd felt fear then, when I'd been battling him so that I might save my helpless father and mother, but I can remember—more clearly than most of the events that day, really—that it had been muddled by my processes of thought, in which I remember struggling to analyze his actions in a poor attempt to better my understanding of the man himself and what his purpose truly might be as I sat there and breathed in those domineering fumes. I don't know—maybe all these offers he threw my way affected me more than I'd allowed myself to believe. I guess I'd be lying if I said that I didn't think about those offers—and how my life might become if I were to, oh, say, accept—and I guess I'd been doing that then, beneath the tree at what I'd come to recognize as our picnic table. And really, who could blame me? Of course, I would never let myself succumb to his evil, but how could I not help but wonder how my own powers might improve if I _did _finally take up that ever present offer and allow him to teach me those twenty some years worth of knowledge? I suppose it may be hard to imagine how I could even think of doing such a thing, but then, you wouldn't understand how much of a struggle these powers have provided me; anyone who knows me well enough to have witnessed me in action knows how hard it is for me to defend the town that has always shunned me, as most days I find I feel I'm in a race with these ghosts and I'm losing, because while my powers are at what I'm going to phrase not-so-generously at a stand-still, the ghosts seem to be becoming increasingly difficult, so much so that sometimes I just barely escape a battle, or come out with bruises and scrapes a-plenty, sometimes fighting for consciousness, and—once—having to be carried back to my house and put into my bed by Tucker and Sam. So, as you might imagine, being put through such a thing day after day and then being presented with such a fantastic offer—one that someone in my position would never expect and could only wish to receive (that is, if it is presented in such a manner that they _can _take it, which it was not)—can make you not only resent the beliefs you've come to hold and feel forced to abandon them but begin to hate yourself for feeling so partial to the very thing that keeps you from embracing the help, the warmth: your quest for what is good. And I certainly was becoming to feel this way.

I sat there contemplating these things for a very long while, and I might have for a while longer, too, if the bell had not rung, signaling to us it was time to return to class. I remember slowly dragging myself up, balancing my tray, on which I had an empty strawberry yogurt container, the leftover crusts of a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and a small portion of the pasta salad Jazz had made and packed for me, insisting I was not getting those time old essential nutrients—thus why I didn't _eat _it—in one hand and my backpack in the other. I swung it over my shoulder and walked back towards the doors of the cafeteria, where there was a big black trash bin in which to dump your lunch, and a dirty stack of spaghetti-sauce- and gum-encrusted trays beside it for the lunch ladies to pick up to clean for another day. I had almost made it, I think; in fact, my hand was on one of the door's wide handles when the jocks came into sight, and from where I was standing, I could see them, and their cigarettes—as well as an array of illegal substances which they had not even touched—clear as day.

You see, the steps that lead up to the cafeteria doors are flanked on one side by something like a wall, which separates the students from the area where the big dumpsters and much of the janitors' equipment is, which the school seemingly wisely decided was much too dangerous to give the kids access to, especially with some of the most stereotypical bullies you'd ever encounter in your whole freaking life. It's also been rumored that it is a place for teachers to hide the dead bodies of kids they murder for not doing homework or coming to class late, but that was simply a rumor, and it is not the point. The point _is_, the school didn't have enough money to build a structure in which they could store these things, nor did they have enough to build a solid, Great-type wall; instead, they put up a series of small walls, all with cracks in between each individual one that any kid could slip through but they hoped would have enough sense not to. But Dash and his goons didn't, as it was inside these walls that the four or five of them sat, smoking lazily and laughing as they talked about attractive girls in our school they'd like to have sex with, and through this crack I had an incredibly clean view of them…and it would seem they had a pretty good view of me, too, as one of them looked up and noticed me.

"Hey, look," the jock, who I recognized to be Kwan, Dash's best friend, said, and grinned one of those grins you know can only come with evil intent—a grin that I saw on the faces of many of my ghost enemies. "It's Fenton."

I would like to say, simply, the rest is history and leave it at that, but it wasn't, even though you undoubtedly know what path I would chose to take seeing as I'm sitting here now, alone in the holding cell of Amity Park's optimistically small police station. I'd like to tell you all—look, I did drugs, and there's nothing more to it. But when it came to my parents, I found myself scrambling to come up with an explanation, feeble as it may be, to justify these actions I took.

I remember the phone call to my parents—the only one I would be able to make, and one which made me feel more like a complete piece of crap than ever before. My mom was weeping, and she never cried, not even when her own mother died of ovarian cancer. My dad's voice was hard, and unforgivingly so; similarly to my mother's situation, he had never raised his voice as he did last night, and the worst part was, he was completely justified in doing so.

"Why did you do this, Danny?" he said, and amongst my mother's sobs I could hear his fist collide with the table on which we kept our telephone. "Why did you do this?"

Well, I did not have an answer for him, as, even now, after having sat in this cell for as long as a day and contemplating the events of that afternoon, I still don't have one for _myself_. I would like to lay the blame solely on Dash, of course—tell them that they'd corrupted me like every other generic bully you'd see on TV. And they might believe it, too, but I knew that it was really more than that. In all honesty, I think this poor decision of mine stemmed from my desire to fit in, find some form of acceptance in this hierarchy system our school had adapted and dictated who you could hang out with and who you couldn't. I guess I thought that if I took those drugs with them, they'd let me join their little group—maybe even left me throw the football around with them—but now that I've had a while to consider yesterday's events, I see that the only reason they had even _offered _me the drugs in the first place was so that I could not rat them out, seeing as I'd seen what they were doing and I'd only keep quiet if I was fearful I'd be convicted myself. But I don't think they ever expected to hear the janitor's heavy footsteps approaching, although I guess they'd expected it more than me, because they promptly shoved the remaining drugs into my hands and took off running before I could say, "going ghost!"

Yes, I could force the blame upon them, because they certainly _did _deserve it, but that trait that all my enemies associate with my name—goodness, of course—kept me from doing so. Besides, it had crossed my mind, if vaguely, that since Dash and his goons were pretty important to our school in that they were the only thing that kept it, and the town, from fading out of the picture of relevance and into the darkness of unimportance. Amity Park is a high-school football-centered community, and if the five best players on the team were suddenly jailed for drug abuse, we'd have to find a new name for ourselves. Well, we wouldn't—if I'd said anything, they'd slap on some slander charges with that D.A., and they'd go to the football game on Friday night and cheer without feeling a pang of guilt. Corruption at its finest. But no one would miss the kid who is nothing, never been anything, and never will be.

I think I had taken this concept more lightly when my head had been instilled with the idea that my parents would come to the station to take me home in a matter of hours. But, as you might have guessed, my parents aren't exactly lawyers or doctors or technicians; in fact, neither of them have steady jobs, and have gone as long as years without leaving the home for longer than an hour or two. In actuality, they continue to receive loans with which they are trying to support our family, but because most of that money ends up being put to their ghost fighting devices, Jazz had to take up two jobs—one at the supermarket (for discounts) and one at the drugstore (for more discounts). So I'm not exactly sure where I believed the money for my bail would come from; maybe it was simply my lack of knowledge when it came to the proceedings of arrests, or how glamorous a thing TV made it seem, like you could just walk out of the jailhouse and be free until you had to come to court, but I came to realize—and very quickly—the difference between television and real life. The price they named was more than my parents could make in two years.

"Danny," my father had said to me into the phone, his voice softening with dark concern, and beginning to mingle with something that reminded me of despair, that emotion that then had yet to be instilled in me but would soon, and was, now. "We don't have that kind of money. You know that. There's nothing we can do."

So I would be condemned to sit here in the stench of my actions, resenting not only Dash with a greater passion then I'd ever had for most things in my life—and there were many things that I resented—but also resenting myself, wondering how I could have done such a thing; if I wasn't thinking of myself when I did it, what about my parents? What about Jazz, who I was closest to of any one? Tucker and Sam? I guess I'll have plenty of time to sit here beneath hot white light and ponder my actions; maybe, after at least thirty days, I'll have conjured up a good answer to that overlying question to ease my own suffering and maybe a few explanations for those I've upset along the way . In fact, maybe this is what I need—a good period of time to think on my actions while my family and friends deal with it out of my sight and hearing. Fine. That works. If they want to keep me in a holding cell for a month, that's dandy by me. At least I won't have to go to school.

I was lying in the small cot beneath cream colored sheets pushed against one of the walls of this little metal box when the door opened. I didn't bother to open my eyes—I figured it was one of the two guards, Randy and Shaun, bringing me in a late meal.

"Kid, get up," the guard, Randy, said briskly and rapped on one of the metal bars a few times. "You're out."

"Out?" I said, and sat up. In Randy's hand, there was a glimmering set of keys.

"Yeah," he said, and began unlocking the cell. "Some guy posted bail for you."

"Who?"

"Some guy named Vlad Masters."


End file.
